


till human voices wake us and we drown

by greenlily



Category: Camelot - Lerner/Loewe
Genre: Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-04
Updated: 2017-12-04
Packaged: 2019-02-10 16:33:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12915813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenlily/pseuds/greenlily
Summary: If you can fly, then you can fall.





	till human voices wake us and we drown

**Author's Note:**

  * For [borevidal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/borevidal/gifts).



**1\. Sirventes: The Squire**

He will say, afterwards, that there is a great roar in his mind when first he draws the sword. Even to those he loves best he will say it. In the years to come, there will be much of him that belongs to his people, but between him and Excalibur there will yet be some things that are theirs alone.

In truth, the sound of the sword pulling free of the stone is the sound of a bell inside his head.

It is the sound of chains on his hands and his feet, it is the sound of silver-belled jesses binding the talons of a hawk, it is the sound of an iron cage swinging shut.

People are shouting something. Shouting at him, most likely. Kay will be so angry. Better not to think of that just now. There is the weight in his hand, and the weight on his shoulders, and everything else will have to take its own course.

He raises his face to the light. There are flames behind his eyelids, orange-gold-red. As long as he does not open his eyes, he can stay here forever, in this place where it is always morning and the sword is always in his hand and he is always little Wart who was once a hawk against the sun.

A hand falls on the back of his neck. It is not true, then, they are not shouting for him, he is not the King. Even Kay would not dare to lay hands upon the King born of all England--

"Long live the King," says Merlyn's voice quietly.

His eyes fly open against his will. Kay is kneeling at his feet, and Sir Ector, and two young knights who they had met on the road. Behind them, around them, are all the people who have come to see the tournament. There will be no tournament, now, but there are all these people, and they will expect to see something. 

Merlyn is not there. No one is touching him. There is only the sword in his hand, and the eyes of the people, and the sunlight, and no one is touching him.

Merlyn lives his life on a path that runs backwards. He knows things that haven’t happened. Did Merlyn know about this?

He looks over his shoulder, just to be certain, and meets the eyes of a little girl. She is perhaps ten years younger than himself, perhaps less, and she is watching him as a cat watches a hawk. She goes on watching him until the elderly woman at her side takes her hand and leads her away. 

Neither of them will remember this when they meet again.

 

**2\. Viadeira: The Princess**

This is a nice tree. 

Leafy. 

Tall, but not too tall. No birds in residence. Cool and green. Comfortable branches. Yes, a perfectly satisfactory tree on all counts. Arthur thinks he might stay here for a while. Maybe forever.

And then she appears out of nowhere, running, her red cloak flying behind her like wings, and he forgets to breathe. 

Her prayers are like nothing he's ever heard before. He hadn't known, before, that you could be angry while you prayed, or selfish, or despairing. Despair is a sin. Wrath is a sin. Selfishness is worse. But this girl is so lovely and so very alive. Surely her saint must hear her.

Arthur listens to her words, although he knows he shouldn't, and something inside him goes cold, then hot, then cold again. This girl, this lovely girl, this is his promised bride, and she doesn't want to be promised or a bride. She doesn't want to be a Queen. 

He can understand that, because he didn't want to be a King.

Merlyn lives his life on a single path that runs backwards. Arthur lives his life on two paths that run side by side. One of them is the path that passes through things that are happening to him, as they happen, his days and nights and the things he can see and hear and touch, running from beginning to end like anyone's life runs. 

On the other path is the story that Merlyn is seeing from end to beginning. Merlyn tells Arthur what is happening in that story, sometimes, although not as often as he remembers himself doing. Merlyn does, and doesn't, want Arthur to know how that story ends. 

Arthur has always understood, vaguely, that his two paths are separated by something that is shadowed and thin and breakable. The light on the other side may be more than he can bear. Or, and this is what frightens him, there may be no light there. 

As long as he doesn't step onto that path, he can stay here forever, in this place where it is always cool and green and there is always a pretty girl and he is always a young man in a tree. 

It's a nice tree.

The sound of the branch cracking beneath him is the sound of ice on a frozen pond, it is the sound of a window being flung open to admit the sunlight, it is the sound of tumbling onto that other path with his eyes shut and praying that he will see something, anything, when he opens them.

_A thousand pardons, milady._

_...Wait!_

_Don't run._

 

**3\. Ensenhamen Del Cavaier: The Knight**

Their first meeting leaves a bruise over his heart.

Lance, of course, has no idea that the man he has hit in the chest is King Arthur. He only knows that he was challenged and that a challenge must be answered. It is a test, everything is a test, and failure is not an option.

Later, Arthur will come to realize that Lance does indeed grasp the concept of compromise, in an intellectual sort of way. He understands perfectly well why it appeals to other people. It's simply that it's not an possibility for him, personally.

Arthur lives his life on two paths side by side. Merlyn lives on a single path running backwards. Guenevere's path runs straight ahead before her, and she fixes her eyes on her feet because she doesn't want to see where it's going.

Lancelot never looks down. Not once. His eyes are fixed on something unimaginably vast, in the far distance, and nothing nearer than that can get his attention. 

What Arthur sees, at once, is that Lancelot du Lac is terrified of ambiguity. He fears no mortal man, he trusts in God to shield him from temptation, but Lance cannot truly bring himself to believe that God will guide him if he stumbles into the dark places with no walls. Knowing that his faith is thus incomplete, he is all the more afraid. Leaving his path is...failure is not an option.

As long as Lancelot is kneeling before him, Arthur can stay here forever, in this place where he is always a King and Lancelot is always a young man who may become a knight and they are always strangers.

Lance rises to his feet because his King commands him.

Arthur wishes suddenly, desperately, not for Merlyn at all, but for his Queen. This is...

This is a responsibility he had not expected, it is a path he had not seen, it is a weapon he had drawn without knowing. This is dangerous.

This is a bruise over his heart, until the end of his days.

 

**4\. Desdansa: The Queen**

Arthur sees Lionel fall, and thinks to himself, _This is where it begins._

They bring Lionel to him, great laughing Lionel with his shaggy golden hair like a lion in truth, lying pale and still on a litter made of two lances and someone’s cloak, and Arthur looks down at him for a long time. Finally, he reaches down and pulls another cloak--Dinadan’s, he notices absently--over Lionel’s face. He wills his hands to stop shaking.

_This is where it begins. Merlyn thought he never told me, but I knew._

_...oh, Jenny._

And then, as if it was inevitable, Lancelot is coming towards them. The crowd parts for him like water. The tournament is over, but the eyes of the people, all these people, they will expect to see something.

Lance kneels and takes Lionel’s hand. It seems to Arthur that the next part happens in flashes, like lightning--

\--Lionel’s hand moves--

\--Lance staggers to his feet--

\--a knight bows to him, another, Guilliam, Sevren, Sagramore--

\--the ladies’ gowns billow around them like blossoms as they curtsy--

\--he is face to face with Guenevere--

As long as she does not move, Arthur can stay here forever, in this place where it has not yet begun and it will never begin and it may not come to pass and--

\--Lancelot bows.

Lance came to Camelot for the love of Arthur’s Table, for its new order and its perfect symmetry and for the love of something that has rules and boundaries and would shield him always from doubt and uncertainty.

He did not come to Camelot for the love of Arthur, and Arthur has accepted that. He has accepted it because Lance’s eyes have been fixed on something unimaginably vast and distant. Nothing closer could get his attention, nothing realer, nothing more tangible. The Table, always the Table, and behind that, the stern face of his God. 

Lancelot, who once cast himself down before his King and would not rise until commanded, bows low before his Queen. 

_Merlyn, make me a hawk._

_Let me fly away from here._  


 

**5\. Descort: The Sword**

He will say, afterwards, that he knew everything.

It will be the last thing he can do for them, this lifting of the burden from their shoulders, this drawing of the pain they have carried for so many years.

He hadn’t known, not for certain, not until tonight. He could say that he doesn’t know yet. If he doesn’t see it, does it really happen?

Arthur has been afraid, sometimes, of Lancelot’s transparent desperation to know where the boundaries are. There is something terrible that Lance is keeping at bay, something from which he seeks shelter behind rules and honor. He clings to chivalry as though it is a wall between him and something he does not dare to contemplate.

There are no walls to protect Lancelot. There is a wall at Jenny’s back, all her choices leading her to the place where she has nowhere to run. And Arthur, who has walked a double path and has learned to cross the barrier between them, is trapped tonight inside a wall through which he cannot pass. He can’t see it, but it is there.

If he had never pulled the sword from the stone, would any of this have happened?

Arthur, the King born of all England, draws Excalibur from its sheath. It is a bell ringing in his head, it is chains and cages, it is the whisper of green leaves and the eyes of the people and the feathers of a hawk--

\--the sword flies from his hand, point-first and crosses the place where he knows the wall to be--

\--and lands point-first in the ground a few feet away.

In the end, after all, a part of him will stay here forever, in this place. 

Between him and Excalibur there will yet be some things that are theirs alone.

 

**6\. Planh: The King**

Jenny is not at Joyous Gard. The holy sisters give her shelter, healing, a place, someone to be other than a Princess and a Queen and an excuse. She takes no vows, but she works in the garden and learns to care for the sick and the wounded. 

Guenevere never comes to Joyous Gard, but she comes to see Arthur there when he is dying.

They have had such a long time at Joyous Gard together, Arthur and Lancelot, longer than Arthur could ever have expected. He didn’t think he would survive the war. Camelot had held no safety for him, no shelter, and he had gone to Lance’s castle simply because he hadn’t known where else to go.

Lance had not been there. He had left no word. The castellan of Joyous Gard, a tall Frenchman with an expressionless face, had made Arthur welcome but had been able to tell him little. A week had gone by, two, four, the season tilting over into winter.

And then there had been a wild night of rain and wind, and a horse’s swift hooves on the road from Glastonbury, the three clashes of the triple gates being thrown open, and Lancelot dragging himself into the Great Hall to collapse at Arthur’s feet.

Months later, they had walked together through the graveyard. Lancelot had stopped at a flat, unmarked stone that lay oblong upon the grass. He had knelt, wedged his fingers beneath the edge, and lifted it. Beneath the stone, Arthur had seen something that looked like a headstone carved in metal.

_Here will repose Lancelot du Lac, the son of King Ban._

This place has no place for him. He can never stay here.

“Stones,” Arthur had said, trying for a laugh. “It always comes back to stones. Things stuck in them, things hidden under them.” The laugh had come out shaky, breathy, nothing like himself.

Lance had taken his hand and led him out of the graveyard. They had not spoken of it again.

The years go by. Mordred sits the throne that had been Arthur’s, and the roads run red. And then a story comes to Joyous Gard of a dark night and a knife, and there is no King in Camelot.  


They ride out by day, or walk, and practice with the swords Lancelot used as a gangly squire. Arthur’s strength never returns after the war, but after a time he is well, or well enough. Lancelot, younger and better-fed in his earliest years, returns to what he was in body if not in mind. 

Excalibur remains in its sheath, wrapped in a red cloak so old it is crumbling, tucked away on a shelf in Lancelot’s armory.

After a time, young men begin to arrive. They have heard stories, tales of Camelot-that-was. They have the usual desire of young people to reinvent the world and improve upon the work of their fathers. Their fathers take what they want and destroy what and who they cannot use, and these young men want a different path.

There are people at Joyous Gard then, first the young men practicing the sword in the yard and shouting across the fields, and then later their young wives and their children. The castellan’s expressionless face softens, Lance’s bent head rises, Arthur’s shoulders straighten. 

The years go by.

And then, in the last days of summer perhaps a score of years after the fall of Camelot, there is a day when Arthur cannot catch his breath. And another. And then more.

One of the first young men to come to Joyous Gard had brought his bride with him, a stout young woman with yellow hair whose family have been healers for as long as there have been herbs to grow. She puts her ear to Arthur’s chest, prods carefully at his fingers and his toes, takes one of his hands in both of hers and looks closely at his fingernails.

Then she lets go of his hand and puts both of her own hands over her face.

That is how Arthur learns he will not live to see the leaves fall from the trees.

Time moves strangely for him after that. He sleeps. When he wakes, sometimes, he is alone, and other times there are people with him. If he wakes by day there is often a child at his bedside, or one of the castellan’s many grown daughters, or Joan the healer. 

If he wakes by night, Lancelot is beside him, always. And then, one night, so is Jenny.

He thinks he’s dreaming, at first. And if he doesn’t move, if he lies there with his eyes open, he can stay forever in this place where Lancelot is beside him and Guenevere is beside him and they are both so, so beautiful--

“Where is Excalibur?” he hears himself say. 

They exchange a look, his knight and his Queen, and then Lance rises to his feet, crosses to the table by the window, comes back with the sword in his hands.

He passes it to Jenny, who unwraps it from its worn red covering. Arthur watches her face and sees the moment she recognizes the cloak.

“All those years,” she says wonderingly. “You kept it.”

“I did.” His voice doesn’t sound like his own. “I asked you not to run.”

Jenny takes both his hands gently in hers for a moment, and wraps them around the sword. She lays the sword on his chest--it is heavy now, that is right, there is the weight in his hands and the weight on his heart and everything else will have to take its own course.

_Merlyn, make me a hawk._

_Long live the King._

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks, as always, to my extremely patient beta.
> 
> There are many different stories about the final fates of Arthur, Lancelot and Guenevere. However, this is a story specifically about the versions of these characters that appear in the musical, and the musical doesn't provide an end to their stories, so I've taken the liberty of inventing one.
> 
> The title is from T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock". The quote in the summary is from the Jeremy Sams translation of Bertolt Brecht's "Threepenny Opera". The headings of each section refer to genres of music performed by troubadours in the Middle Ages.
> 
> _sirventes_ \--a poem performed by a soldier or servant  
>  _viadeira_ \--a song devised to lighten the burden of boredom while traveling  
>  _ensenhamen del cavaier_ \--a poem concerned with teaching or instruction, in this case the instruction of a knight  
>  _desdansa_ \--a dance designed for sad occasions  
>  _descort_ \--a discordant song  
>  _planh_ \--a lament, often for the death of a noble figure


End file.
